St. Vincent launches Digital Witness Tour with a jolt

They slid along invisible lines like a pair of faders on a mixing board. As Annie "St. Vincent" Clark came toward the audience, Toko Yasuda retreated to the back of the stage. Then the two reversed direction, never once moving their heads or turning to either side. They might have been floating.

Instead, they were taking tiny steps with nervous rapidity, covering ground with machine precision, and spitting out the notes of the barbed outro of "Birth in Reverse" from their guitars as they did. It was clockwork; it was unnerving; it was slightly unbelievable.

The same could be said for the entire St. Vincent concert that jolted a sold-out crowd in New York City on Wednesday night. Nothing about the show was comfortable. It was hot as June inside the house, and as cramped as the impersonal, post-industrial Terminal 5 ever gets. Dancing was impossible, and even clapping required more arm space than the accommodations provided. But fans kept their eyes on Clark and her bandmates as if they were watching an experiment in cold fusion conducted by scientists trained in the handling of dangerous elements.

It is almost never advisable for a rock group to perform without a bass player. Even in experimental pop — and St. Vincent is nearly always experimental — the bass provides the anchor that prevents the song from drifting into turbulent waters. Yet St. Vincent chose not to bring one along on the Digital Witness Tour, and it wasn’t missed.
This is, in part, the residue of strategy: Clark, faithful complementary piece Yasuda, daring synthesizer player Daniel Mintseris and so-stiff-he-swings drummer Matt Johnson take turns covering the bottom end. But it’s also because St. Vincent’s music thrives on destabilization. Her songs are simultaneously masterful and imbalanced, seamless and oddly incomplete. When confronting a St. Vincent song for the first time, it often feels like a piece is missing. By the end of the performance, Clark and her fellow musicians convince listeners that not only is that piece unnecessary, but it would be an affront to design if it was included.

St. Vincent first attracted attention by pairing intricate ‘50s-soundtrack melodies with fussy, fragmentary arrangements as sharp and refracting as a pane of broken glass. She perfected the approach on "Strange Mercy," a 2011 album that plays like an anxiety attack. Placid surfaces give way unexpectedly to violent eruptions of guitar and synthesizer; Clark’s low-octave, medicated purr suddenly becomes, at a dime-drop, a high-octave yelp of fright. "St. Vincent," the recently released follow-up, is more consistent. Its star’s eccentricities are more boldly caricatured, and therefore easier to embrace; it better conceals its undercurrent of existential terror. It may make Clark the star she deserves to be.

But it is telling that the best moments of the concert — the ones that felt most characteristic of St. Vincent as we’ve come to percieve her — all happened during "Strange Mercy" songs. Yasuda’s theremin freakout during "Northern Lights" was second in intensity only to the apocalypse of hotwired guitar and arriving-UFO synth that crowned "Surgeon," Clark’s unalloyed expression of anxiety. Her boldest rock star moves came during "Strange Mercy" songs, too: she encored with a wounded-but-threatening solo rendition of the title track and sang "Cheerleader," her declaration of purpose, from atop a ziggurat, white waves of her Beethoven hairdo casting tangled shadows on the backdrop.

Clark is an expressive singer; with a six-string in her hands, she’s a revelation. She is equally adept at Arto Lindsay-style no-wave skronk, fleet and feather-light passages reminiscent of Steve Howe of Yes. And as she demonstrated on the new "Prince Johnny," she can funk out with the fierceness of Parliament. Clark’s playing can be beautiful, but more often than not, she’d rather sting than soothe. The back half of "Huey Newton" called for a quick slide into Zeppelin sludge; "Regret," a buzzsaw of thick, ugly chords. She got her hands dirty in a hurry, and did so with glee.

Between "Strange Mercy" and "St. Vincent," Clark cut a playful, brass-spiked collaborative set with Talking Heads frontman and kindred spirit David Byrne. The Terminal 5 show contained no songs from "Love This Giant," the Byrne and St. Vincent album, but managed to honor the project anyway. The choreography at Terminal 5 — all martial moves, robotic hand gestures, unexpected moments of twitchy synchronicity between musicians — felt indebted to the Love This Giant Tour and "Stop Making Sense," the Talking Heads movie.

Some of this stage blocking felt oppressive and somewhat anti-rock. Was it really necessary for Clark to sing "I Prefer Your Love" from her back? Likewise, her scripted stage banter had the flat ring of off-Broadway dialogue. Luckily, when the musicians start to play, all the affectations are drowned out by the rattle of nerves and the snap of synapses. Every generation deserves its visionary, uncompromising, frightening art-rock band. We’ve got ours.